I Learnt The Hard Way to Sell IP Repeatedly, Rather Than For A One-Time Fee

As the founder and CEO of Blutui, Graeme Blake leads a team of amazingly talented technologists and marketers hellbent on revolutionising digital agency workflows. Blutui empowers agencies to complete projects 400% faster with 66% fewer resources, combining productivity and innovation to deliver exceptional results.

At the forefront of this innovation is Blutui AI Components and Blutui Courier, positioning Blutui as a leader in advancing efficiency, scalability, and creative excellence in the advertising industry.

He is absolutely committed to pushing the boundaries of martech innovation and automation and to provide agencies with a competitive edge in the face of external technological pressure.

Close your eyes. The year is 1997, ‘Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone’ has hit the bookshops and ‘Barbie Girl’ by AQUA is pumping through Discman headphones all around the globe.

By the time ‘97 came and went I had been freelancing for a little over three years, setting up my first creative agency later in 1998. I was 28-years-old (do the math) with a portfolio of clients, a magnificent mullet and moustache combo and a reputation for doing great work. My client list was growing and the projects were getting increasingly challenging, in a good way.

These were the good ol’ days.

As a creative, I’m a problem solver first and foremost, and an advertising client came to me with a left-field product design challenge. He was an Aussie V8 race car driver and he expected everything he touched to be instantly turbo-charged, and a podium finish. I couldn’t wait to impress. I trusted the guy, I mean he was on TV most Sundays racing V8 Supercars.

Thinking back, this was my first mistake.

While he was battling Bathurst, I worked around the clock over a weekend and rendered a concept that fulfilled the product design brief beautifully. I was young, naive and far too eager to please. Not even taking the time to sign off on terms (mistake number two), and by the following Monday I was eagerly delivering the knock-out solution. Turns out he could work out how many hours there were in a weekend quite easily.

I finally got paid $1,200.

That’s not a huge sum in today’s money, and it wasn’t a lot in 1997 either.

The client took those initial concepts, he engineered prototypes and started selling the product to every major car brand that sold utes into Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Toyota, Ford, Nissan, Mazda and even Holden (RIP Colorado).

He cornered a market and made a fortune. Fast.

The product sold for years to come. I calculated that less than a dollar per unit in royalties would have earned my family a beachfront property or two by now. But what fun would that have been really, right?

After this experience, my inner entrepreneur went through the entire range of emotions. Frustration, anger, disappointment, at myself mostly. I was envious and even weirdly admired the client for pulling off such a huge deal, albeit based on my bargain basement IP. I was livid at myself.

Then a wonderful friend, who after listening to me retell the saga once too often, changed my outlook forever. He suggested he might back me if I would only back myself.

That was the turning point in my career. To look for opportunities to sell my IP over and over, and over again, rather than once for a one time fee.

It meant taking a punt, or sharing risk with a client, but it reframed my thinking from that moment to this day. I began looking at every design, marketing and business challenge through the lens of opportunity, and it’s amazing how this coloured my thinking. I no longer looked at a project as work, I looked at every brief as a way of broadening my knowledge, enhancing my commercial experience, and sharpening my capabilities. So that when the opportunity came along I would be ready to act, ready to apply my skill and newfound belief in myself to the problem at hand.

And it worked, certainly not immediately, but over successive false starts and failed projects, each offering a wealth of learnings, a product eventually got to market. One that I ideated, designed a solution for and built a business around to serve a global market.

This was a success, of a sort.

Except for one seemingly unimportant aspect in the early 00s, that it was a single use plastic wine packaging product. A product that excited the market for about four years before single-use anything was outlawed, and rightly so, looking back I shudder.

So at this point, not only did I know what it took to bring a project together from a design, marketing and advertising perspective as a marketer, but I had spent time bringing an actual product to actual markets around the word. I’d jumped the shark, I was on the client side. This experience turned out to be solid gold and would help me enormously through every commercial experience as a designer, agency owner and subsequently in my role as a tech founder and CEO. I learned how to think like a client, a creative and an agency owner -- this was a valuable lesson.

Thinking like a client, understanding all the challenges a client has to think about, over and above what your agency is trying hard to pitch them, offers a rare perspective.

I learned this, so seldom is the marketing issue you’re being asked to solve the core problem that needs solving. So often it's a knee jerk reaction to a box-checking exercise handed down by a well intentioned but often misguided board member.

Yet after a few searching questions I would often reveal an entirely different challenge, the real reason the entire C-suite hadn’t slept all quarter.

Off the back of this discovery an entirely different brief was often developed, sometimes for an entirely different skill set that didn’t include my agency, or any agency for that matter.

Creative thinking was required in places like fulfilment, aesthetic or production, rather than marketing or design, often a different type of creativity was required altogether.

Ultimately, this set of collective learnings culminated in me identifying a challenge we were having in our own indie agency some years later. Technology fragmentation, woeful productivity, projects running over time and budget and a chaotic studio that was performing ok, but only by industry standards of the day.

Fast forward to now and we have addressed an issue that exists in every agency with digital projects, and we’ve solved it in a way that delivers value to an entire industry, not only the agencies that use our platform.

The takeout from all this?

Had I stuck rigidly to my knitting, purely working for advertising clients for a fee and with a service mindset, answering their briefs, delivering on their scopes of work, I can only imagine what would have happened.

I may have built up a solid agency. I may have even exited, selling to a holding company or private equity, leaving with enough for a beachfront property or two. But by challenging myself to be on the lookout for, and open to opportunities along the way, I find myself with many (many) years of agency experience and leading a global technology group solving an agency-killing issue that plagues agencies large and small across adland.

So to all you creatives, the entrepreneurs and the innovators, be cautious, back yourself, take a punt on being your own greatest client and see where it takes you. You may find your very own beachfront paradise somewhere along the way.